Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A number of scientific methods have been developed to detect and/or measure one or more properties of tissues of a person's body. The one or more properties could be any properties that could indicate or infer a medical condition or health state of the tissue and/or of the person. The one or more properties could be a temperature, electrical impedance or impedance spectrum, compliance, magnetic resonance properties (e.g., T1, T2 times), opacity to X-rays, degree of fluorescence and/or fluorescent spectrum, or some other property or properties. The one or more properties could be related to the presence, concentration, or other properties of an analyte. The analyte could be any substance that, when present in or absent from a person's body and/or tissues, or present at a particular concentration or range of concentrations, may be indicative of a medical condition or health state of the tissue and/or of the person. The one or more analytes could include enzymes, reagents, hormones, proteins, cells or other molecules. For example, the analytes could be cancer cells in a tissue of a human body and the detected properties could be related to the presence of cancer cells (e.g., a temperature of a cancer cell mass that is detectably different from a temperature of non-cancerous tissue, the presence of a fluorescent, X-ray, magnetic resonance, or other label that selectively interacts with cancer cells, an increased concentration of an angiogenesis-stimulating agent).
During a surgical intervention, a surgeon can rely on his/her senses (sight, touch, etc.) to detect one or more properties of tissue. The surgeon could rely on these senses to determine how to perform the surgical intervention, e.g., where to make an incision to access deeper tissues, or to excise diseased, necrotic, cancerous, or otherwise unhealthy tissue while leaving bordering healthy tissue intact. The surgeon can rely on imaging information generated by imaging modalities (e.g., X-ray, CT, MRI, ultrasound) to determine the location, extent, or other properties of target tissue based on relationships between the imaging information and anatomical information made available to the surgeon directly by the surgeon's senses. Additionally or alternatively, markers, fiducials, or other registration artifacts can be used to correlate imaging information with anatomical information directly available to the surgeon during the surgical intervention.